Wu-Chronicles

What is it with American punks that they take all the very worst stuff from Britain?...

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Wu-Chronicles

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Wu-Chronicles

What is it with American punks that they take all the very worst stuff from Britain? Given a choice of [a]Magazine[/a] or The Buzzcocks they plump for knuckle-draggers like The Exploited every time. And then they sell it back to us and we convince ourselves it’s cool.

California’s Peechees have been doing exactly this for the past five years, and ‘Life’ gathers together 18 rarities from that time. Living by the maxim that one chord is all you need, they hack and slash their way through a riot of resolutely gormless garage-punk noise with no song over three minutes. Which sounds like fun until you realise it’s pretty much what yob rockers Anti-Pasti were doing in 1980.

Phlegm-spattered anthems like ‘Quadruple Bypass’ get churned out in an endless stream of production line powerchords with singer Chris bleating like an angry sheep. On later recordings, like 1997’s ‘Love Is The Law’, musical progress manifests itself as the same crap, but with slightly less noisy guitars; still, at least by this point their musical horizons extended as far as X-Ray Spex.

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